The invention begins with an intention to create a Java visual table widget (vTable) with Internet capability on the Web browser. It can be used by the programmers who need a table widget written in Java to organize data presentation. vTable is a programmable layout manager that supports data presentation in two dimensional grids, rows, columns and cells. vTable adopts model-view GUI paradigm, such that for each view object, there is a model object controlling its contents. There can be multiple views associated with a single model. So once the model""s contents changed, all of the related views will be automatically refreshed with the new contents.
When it was completed, we felt a real Internet application that builds upon the visual table would serve to enhance the widget""s interfaces and features. The application of Web based Calendar came naturally, since every calendar view uses two dimensional table. Jigsaw puzzle was also in consideration, but was ruled out for it has no practical usage.
The calendar started off as a Web based personal organizer. It provides daily events and appointments scheduling. To make our Web Calendar stands out from the others, we created the calendar-applet (xe2x80x9cCappletxe2x80x9d) architecture to support the multimedia event contents distribution and online registration. It features client side event specification and the association between Capplet(trademark) and event. To leverage on the Web""s interconnection nature, we created group concept which represents a collection of individual canlendars. It allows the sharing and coordinating of events and schedules among a group of users. With the inclusion of group features, the Web calendar has grown from a personal organizer to a scheduling and calendaring groupware.
In addition, as we build the calendar applet, we had enhanced our Java GUI foundation library to support our GUI needs. This includes specialized Layout managers, Panels, List controls and miscellaneous components. Layout manager organize its components geographical locations. Panel is a container that is contained within a container. All of these enhancements are necessary for the Web Calendar GUI and are not provided by the Java language Abstract Windowing Toolkit (AWT).
The scope of the invention covers: 1) Java personal organizer, 2) Internet scheduling and calendar groupware, 3) Calendar event with multimedia effect, 4) Joint multiple calendars view, 5) Open calendar architecture that is ready to run any Java applet, 6) Invocation method for programs with display panels and 7) Internet transaction done directly through calendar events.
The Internet and World Wide Web
Internet
The Internet is the name for a group of worldwide information resources. The roots of the Internet lie in a collection of computer networks that were developed in the 1970s. They started with a network called the Arpanet that was sponsored by the United States Department of Defense. The original Arpanet has long since been expanded and replaced, and today its descendent form the global backbone of what we call the Internet.
It would be a mistake however to think of the Internet as a computer network, or even a group of computer networks connected to one another. The computer networks are simply the medium that carries the huge resource of practical and enjoyable information. The Internet allows millions of people all over the world to communicate and to share. It is a people-oriented society.
Internet has a slew of services: Text file, Telnet session, Gopher, Usenet news group, File Transfer Protocol and the latest and greatest World Wide Web, each with either specialized information contents or specialized network functions.
World Wide Web (WWW)
The Web, one of Internet""s many resources, was originally developed in Switzerland, at the CERN research center. The idea was to create a way for the CERN physicists to share their work and to use community information. This idea was soon embraced within the Internet as a general mechanism for accessing information and services.
Like many other Internet resources, the Web uses a client/server system. Users use a client program called a browser act as a window into the Web. From the point of Web, everything in the universe consists of either documents or links. Thus the job of a browser is to read documents and to follow whatever links users select. A browser knows how to access just about every service and resource on the Internet, especially it knows how to connect to WWW servers that offer public hypertext documents.
In the language of the Web, a hypertext document is something that contains data and possibly, links to other documents. What makes the Web so powerful is that a link might go to any type of Internet resource. It is flexible and convenient to use.
The Internet Protocols
The protocols that Internet hosts use to communicate among themselves are key components of the net. For the WWW, HTTP is the most important of these communication protocols. All documents on the WWW are referenced through a URL. And each URL begins with the name of the protocol, HTTP, that is used to find that document. A Web browser must have the HTTP capability built-in.
Java
Java is a language developed by Sun with the intent to meet the challenge of application development in the context of heterogeneous network-wide distributed environments. And the paramount among these challenges is the secure delivery of applications that consume the minimum of system resources, can run on any hardware and software platform, and can be dynamically extended.
The massive growth of the Internet and the World-Wide Web leads us to a completely new way of looking at development and distribution of software. To live in the world of electronic commerce and distribution, the Java language supports secure, high-performance, and highly robust application development on multiple platforms in heterogeneous, distributed networks.
Operating on multiple platforms in heterogeneous networks invalidates the traditional schemes of binary distribution, release, upgrade, patch, and so on. To survive in this jungle, the Java language has to be architectural-neutral, portable, and dynamically adaptable.
To ensure the programmers can flourish within their software development environment, the Java language system that emerged to meet these needs is simple, so it can be easily programmed by most developers, familiar, so that current developers can easily learn the Java language, objected oriented, to fit into distributed client-server applications, multithreaded, for high performance in applications that need to perform multiple concurrent activities, and interpreted, for maximum portability and dynamic capabilities.
Java vs. Procedural Languages
At a fundamental level, procedure languages are designed first to provide programmers with a framework for issuing commands for the computer to execute (hence the term xe2x80x9cproceduralxe2x80x9d) and second to allow programmers to organize and manipulate data. Depending on the language, how intuitively a procedural language on these two features very quite a bit. For examples, COBOL, FORTRAN and C are all procedural languages, but each has a specialized area and cannot be interchanged.
An object-oriented language like Java is designed first to allow programmers to define the objects that make up the program and data they contain, and second to define the code that makes up the program.
Many programmers are now using C++ or languages like Object Pascal, Perl 5.0, and Objective C. What these languages have in common is that they are hybrid languages, or procedural languages with object-oriented extensions. These languages make it possible for programmers to use objects within their programs, but they allow-and in many cases required-to use procedural code to accomplish certain tasks.
Java vs. Other Object-Oriented Languages
A pure object-oriented language entails all data in the language is represented in the form of objects. In SmallTalk, which is a pure object-oriented language, every aspect of the language is object- or message-based and all data types, simple or complex, are object classes.
Java implements the basic C simple data types, such as integer, characters and floating point numbers, outside the object system, but deals with everything else as objects. And this language design enables Java to avoid many of the performance pitfalls found in a purely object-oriented language. In all other ways, Java is a pure object-oriented language. All program code and data reside within objects and classes.
Applet
An applet is a small Java program that is automatically downloaded from a Web site and run within your Web browser in response to instructions to do so contained within the Web page you are viewing.
Java Enabled Browser
There are three different types of Web browser, ordinary Web browser, Java-capable Web browser and native Java Web browser. Ordinary Web browser is not capable of handling applets. Users of this kind of browser would not get the results produced by the applets.
A Java-capable browser, such as Netscape/Navigator 2.0 and later releases, is a browser that supports Java applets. This kind of browser provides a display area for the applet either in the browser window which displays the Web in the same way that the browser displays images on a page, or in a pop-up window which displays only the applet. The applet can use this display area however it sees fit, using the area to display buttons and other user interface controls or to display graphics and animation.
HotJava, the native Java Web browser, itself was written in Java. Applets running in HotJava can have much more control over the browser""s user interface environment, and the browser can be extended to support new media formats and protocols through the use of Java code. There are definite boundaries between the C code in which the Netscape browser was written and the Java code of the applets that the browser runs.
Java and Other Platforms
Although Sun intends to directly support only a select group of platforms, it has taken steps to ensure that Java will eventually be ported to every platform where there is interest to do so. Sun has made the source code to the JDK freely available for non-commercial use. This triggered a number of efforts to port Java to different platforms including Linux, Next, and Amiga, in addition to Window 95, Window NT and Sun""s Solaris, Macintosh, HP/UX, IBM/AIX, and SGI/Irix. These effort is much necessary to truly make Java applets transparent to all the operating environments that are connected to the Internet.
Prior Art
SparcWork Calendar Tool
SparcWork Calendar Tool is a calendar schedule keeper developed by Sun. On one hand, it serves as a personal organizer capable of scheduling and reminding users of their appointments. On the other hand, as a groupware, it has the capability of sharing schedule information work group users.
Like every other scheduling software, Calendar Tool is strictly text based. There""s no multimedia effect, no joint multiple calendars view, no collaborative features, and it cannot connect to the Internet services such as e-mail and linkage to other Web resources. Above all, like most of the other vendor scheduler/organizer, it functions only within Sun""s proprietary operating system.